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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 12/25/14

Part 3 of The Marriage of Science & Spirit: Negotiating the Great Pre-Nup--Zooming Out on Talking Back to Sam Harris

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Advanced rational thinking--often associated with intelligent scientific thinkers, including many advocates for a "rational" synthesis of science and spirituality, is also known as "formal operational" thinking, the second level of rational thinking identified by developmental researchers



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This kind of thinking is able to operate in much more complex ways, systemically and meta-systemically, holding many simultaneous variables and unknowns. It is capable of relating to information with much more openness, curiosity, and creativity. This kind of thinking can synthesize complex views of whole systems, and it can focus creatively into the future, even amidst change. When healthy, this modality, in contrast to early rational thinking, is actually actively interested in learning, and is often open to feedback and differing perspectives.

Ken Wilber offers a lucid description of advanced rational thinking in Sex, Ecology and Spirituality (p 173-174):"...'formal operational cognition'...means the capacity not just to think, but to think about thinking (and thus 'operate upon' thinking: 'formal operational'). Since you can operate upon or reflect upon your own thought processes, you are to some degree free of them; you can to some degree transcend them; you can take perspectives different from your own; you can entertain hypothetical possibilities; and you can become highly introspective" And...because we can reflect on our own thought processes, and thus to some degree remove ourselves from them, we become capable of imagining all sorts of other possibilities... This is why rationality or reasonableness tends to be universal in character."

It is hard to overstate the importance of formal operational thinking. It is the kind of thinking our educational system is built to foster. It spawned the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the Tech Revolution of our time. It is the de facto lingua franca of advanced contemporary culture. It is the language spoken by Sam Harris. It's the language I'm speaking right now. And this is the language into which trans-rationalist responses to Harris must be translated if they are to matter. It is only insofar as perspectives can be communicated and understood in formal operational terms that they have relevance to the great negotiation over the terms of the marriage contract between science and spirituality.

Formal operational thinking does, however, have certain biases and limitations. Cook-Greuter, in Ego Development (2005, pp 18-21) puts it this way, "For...persons [at this level of mind] rationality will triumph. Thus they are interested in analysis...Truth can be found. One can come closer to it by consistently applying the scientific method, by looking at things rationally, by continuously improving and refining one's methods of inquiry and measuring tools...The major limit of [this] mind set is its acceptance of facts and the external world as real and its blindness to the constructed nature of beliefs, especially the grand myth of conventional science. Although complex scientific analysis is applied, the underlying assumptions of any system are rarely questioned or made explicit. Especially at this stage, knowledge, measurement and prediction are taken for granted..."

One final note: Another limitation of formal operational thinking is that although it can see "whole systems", it sees them abstractly and relates to them conceptually; thus it only thinks from the parts (the data points) to the whole (It cannot think from the whole to the parts).

Early vision-logic--often associated with popular trans-rational integrations of science and spirit


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Terry Patten is a philosopher, teacher, activist, consultant, social entrepreneur, and author. Over the last fifteen years he has devoted his efforts to the evolution of consciousness by facing, examining, and healing our global crisis through (more...)
 

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